The Need for Speed

When I’m talking to a company about a possible fractional role and I’m asked the common “what’s your biggest weakness at work?” question, I always answer “impatience.” I like to move fast (not move fast and break things fast, but move fast and get shit done fast), and I will be frustrated if the company and staff don’t move fast, too.

Jaleh Rezaei, the CMO of Gusto when it grew from 500 to 50,000 customers, and now the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, talks about growing a great marketing culture and she puts speed at the top. She says, “In my experience, speed is the single most important characteristic of a winning marketing team.”

She summarizes the need for speed like this:

• Most of our brilliant ideas don’t work, so
• We need to iterate quickly to find success
• Fast teams lead the market. Slow teams react.

She gives the example of starting a partner program. The slow approach would be to spend a month studying other partner programs to determine their elements, rates of compensation, and so forth, while creating a list of all potential partners before having any meetings with them. Rezaei says that it’s far better to start talking with one potential partner each day, describe the rough outline of what you’re thinking, iterate based on their feedback, and by the end of the month, you will have real market feedback from 20-plus potential partners, the structure of your program, and possibly even a few partners.

Act, fail, learn, and act again.

Fast.